Why Empathy Is The Key To Building Great Teams, Products, and Companies

A good friend told me a hilarious story about continuous improvement. 

His dad was a manager in a manufacturing plant back in the 80s or 90s. I imagined something like the company in “The Goal” by Eli Goldratt.

They invited a continuous improvement expert from a partner company in Japan to come and do a walkthrough with them to look for areas of improvement.

There was a particular part of the process where partially completed work needed to be picked up, carried down a long corridor, around the corner, and back down the same direction to a workstation that was, effectively, right on the other side of a wall from where the stuff originated.

There were long discussions about setting up a conveyor belt or a series of rolling carts to make the job easier.

At one point, upon noticing this, the expert climbs into a forklift and proceeds to drive it right through the wall, creating a huge hole directly between the two workstations. The distance to walk was reduced from about 100 yards to about 20 feet.

Now, I don’t know if that story is true or not. I didn’t press my friend about his dad’s tendency to tell tall tales from the old days. But, it makes a brilliant point about different people’s ability to see problems from different angles.

Much ink has already been spilled emphasizing the importance of applying empathy with customers in your product development process. Yet again, it’s easy to say it to each other, and much harder to put into practice.

When was the last the last time you spoke to your customers directly, not to show off something you’ve built, but simply to find out more about their world and their perspective?

But what about empathy with the other people in our organization?

People are not all the same. It seems so obvious, we tend to just look past each other. But it is surprisingly difficult to keep in mind that someone you work with might have a very different perspective on the problem you are solving together. Those differences can be easily overlooked or brushed aside.

So, put another way, people are not all like you. They don’t all think the same way you do. They don’t have the same strengths and weaknesses as you do.

Empathy is not about being “touchy feely” and talking about your emotions all the time.

Empathy is a tool for effective leadership, and it is a very powerful one.

It’s actually inefficient to manage people whom you don’t really understand. We tend to treat people like they are just like us. But they aren’t. They may have different values. They may have a radically different socio-economic or cultural background. And it sure is hard to derive a win-win solution to a common problem if you don’t really understand them.

Let’s consider some other words or phrases that are synonymous with empathy…

Understanding other people.

Seeing and hearing them.

Appreciating them.

Getting their motivations and values.

Realizing that people make decisions in a different way, and come to different conclusions, than you would.

These are all things that we want to be able to do with people, and that we want others to do with us. So, if empathy feels like a foreign concept, or you just don’t really think about it much, think of it now as simply learning to understand the people you work with so you can do your job more effectively.

The gemba walk is a good example of developing empathy. Japanese for “the actual place”, gemba is a concept from Lean that involves managers going to the assembly line to personally see how things are really done in the factory. This direct seeing puts the manager in the shoes of those doing the work, so that they can better understand what it is like to do the job.

All too often, leaders make decisions that affect their employees, like changing roles, assignments, or teams, without carefully considering the psychological and motivational impacts of those decisions on the employees. This is to act without empathy, and it can be avoided with just a little more consideration.

Empathy is a critical tool in the leadership toolbox. It is well worth your time investing in understanding the other people in your organization, how they differ from you, and how to leverage those differences to build a stronger and more resilient team.

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Want to learn more? Check out our Mindful Leadership Accelerator, where we work with leaders on these and other techniques, now accepting applicants.